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If I may, some people are very attached to the whole "im the most oppressed out of everyone in the world" because it means they dont have to confront their biases and unlearn their bigotry against anyone else, since bigotry against anyone else is automatically "punching up" and therefore justified and righteous, and taking away that possibility is a sign of oppression against them.
On December 31, 1977, the Black Panther published a guest commentary article titled “Principles of Radical Psychiatry” by Claude Steiner, a whitefounder and practitioner of radical psychiatry.
The article opens with a quote by Malcolm X and then asserts that “psychiatry is a political activity” because “the psychiatrist has an influence in the power arrangements of the relationships in which he intervenes”
Steiner argues that psychiatry and the psychiatrist can never be neutral because “when one person dominates oroppresses another, a neutral participant—especially when he is seen as anauthority—becomes a participant in the domination.”
Steiner goes on to state that psychiatry’s false and oppressive claim to neutrality makes marginalized people rightfully avoid psychiatric services. He then offers the alternative of radical psychiatry, writing,
“A radical psychiatrist will take sides. He will advocate the side of those whom he is helping. The radical psychiatrist will not look for the wrongness within the person seeking psychiatric attention:rather, he will look for the way in which this person is being oppressed.”
The Black Panther Party (bpp) believed that overmedicalization of disability, illness, and disease depoliticized and individualized these experiences in ways that obscured the effect of the social and political on people’s bodyminds, especially those from oppressed groups, who are more likely to be subject to state violence. This critique of overmedicalization was not limited to the physical alone but included the mental and psychiatric.
In“Principles of Radical Psychiatry,” Steiner uses language and frameworks with which bpp members and other Black Panther readers would already have been familiar.
For instance, he discusses internalized oppression and refers to the inner voice of internalized oppression as “the Pig,” the sameterm used by the Panthers to refer to police and others complicit in racistimperialist capitalist oppression.
Further, Steiner writes that within radical psychiatry, anger is understood as “a healthy first step in the process of liberation rather than an ‘irrational,’ ‘neurotic,’ or other wise undesirable reaction” and that “violence, not equivalent with anger, may be a product of demystification [the process of understanding one’s oppression], when anger is discounted.”
This framing of anger as an appropriate reaction to oppression and of violence as a valid response to the dismissal of anger produced by oppression aligns directly with arguments made by the bpp that framed Black anger as justified and in need of productive expression.
- Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk
The psychiatric industry already gets away with so many blatant lies as it is, I really think it's time to stop believing this lie that so many mental health professionals with years of schooling and experience, completely missed/misdiagnosed/ late diagnosed a large chunk of women with autism, ADHD, and other learning disabilities because it's “harder to spot” in women and young girls “mask too well” for these professionals to pick up on it. What a complete joke.
The inconvenient truth that many people don't seem to get is that these professionals never cared about diagnosing you accurately. The main goal behind most psychotherapeutic treatments has always been to make you complacent and to fall in line with whatever insurance companies are willing pay for and what they can realistically treat. That's why no matter the circumstance, the emotional distress is treated as the primary problem that needs to be managed and never about the circumstances leading to it.The same people who supposedly “could never pick up” on your ADHD are the same professionals who will immediately diagnose you with MDD or an anxiety disorder based off a generic questionnaire where you bubbled in “most of the time” to vague symptoms like, “Persistent low mood”, “lack of motivation”, “feeling hopeless” and put you on an SSRI to treat the supposed “Chemical imbalance” (which has been fully debunked for decades) that's causing the emotional distress.
These people never gave a fuck. It was always about making sure you didn't have any big emotions so that you go into work everyday, complete your assignments, and don't rebel too much against your superiors.
people misunderstand what ‘gifted kid’ actually means but it’s ok it’s fine it’s cool it’s good
it’s not about actually being gifted, it’s about an initial higher scoring on standardized testing that means little to nothing or being good at learning in the way elementary and middle school wants you to, so you get marked as ‘advanced’. in reality, maybe you had faster development in certain areas, but the issue with being a gifted kid isn’t that “everyone told me I was so cool and special for reading and then I actually wasn’t :(” it’s “I wasn’t properly taught to handle things not coming easily to me, but the adults around me were counting on me not being a ‘difficult’ child in school.”
people who use it as some weird bragging method or interpret it that way are ignoring the way a lot of school systems force certain roles on students to simplify the learning process. If your kid doesn’t need to take notes to understand a science concept bc they get it naturally, well that’s good, but now you’re not teaching them how to take notes and they’re not learning that important soft skill. but because ‘gifted’ kids are easy and don’t show that they’re falling behind in learning in other categories that are harder to quantify, they eventually fall behind after that catches up to them. It’s about the failures of a one size fits all school system trying to compensate in the worst way possible.
And also the thing where ‘gifted’ kids are super likely to also be neuroatypical, which they don’t get screened for because they appear to be doing well in school. Or “You can’t be ADHD/autistic/etc, because you’re doing so well in school!”. Or being shamed for developing mental health issues/generally not being able to keep up with school work later, because you USED TO BE able to do it just fine.
Or the assumption that just because you can read well or you like math class, you’re somehow more EMOTIONALLY mature than your little kid brain is actually capable of being.
Or gifted kids whose parents and teachers put immense pressure on them to Do Great Things and Save The World and you’re like. “I’m 10 and I have no idea how to do that, but everyone is saying that’s my job?”.
This is the best “gifted kid” post out there. I never took notes until college because I didn’t have to, snd when it got challenging I had to literally teach myself note taking at age 18. It also fucks with your perception of asking for help - you’re advanced, you’re competent, you should be able to understand every topic easily. Asking for help/going to office hours/asking for a tutor feels like failing when you were praised in your early years for not needing to do that.
#no one cares how smart you are as an adult they only care about the things adhd makes you bad at <- @elspethdixon, quoted for truth.
people love the social cantagion/"only contagious mental disorder" model of restrictive disordered eating because it's a very clean comfortable pleasant way to ignore the fact that disordered eating is quite often just the most logical response to being inundated with the message that fatness is morally and medically repugnant, socially unacceptable, sexually repulsive, a fate worse than death -- and you can see this in the very way people express concern for the visibly anorexic, lamenting that they "weren't even that fat" and "didn't even need to lose weight." these are things you will never, ever hear if you're fat and your anorexia almost kills you, btw
like i think that "role modeling" and the glorification of dangerous thinness play a part in this, i do think it's irresponsible to model this behavior for young women, but placing the whole weight of disordered eating as a phenomenon on the shoulders of ariana grande or any similar figure falsely locates the problem within the superstructure. your average teenage girl is being put less at risk by waifish starlets than they are by constant, grinding, "well-meaning" daily fatphobic jabs about food and their weight by their parents, teachers, doctors, siblings, classmates, friends etc. and moreover by the general observation that life is actually made crueler and materially harder for fat people
I feel like it hardly matters anymore, but Flock isn't the only unsecured intrusive data selling crime inventing AI hallucinating automated license plate reading mass surveillance camera operators. Axon and Motorola and Amazon and ALPR and CCTV and security cameras should be equally rejected. All surveillance must go.
There is no such thing as benign surveillance.
You are never monitored for your safety.
Don't tag this #america, unless you're talking about the continent, dipshits. You're not exempt from this.
“Time does not bring relief; you all have lied” - Edna St. Vincent Millay
(transcript under the cut)
Keep reading
Yes, even you, Dear Reader, even you.
Restoring my review of the Barbie movie on tumblr. It's one of my most popular reviews on Letterboxd and the last time I posted this, back when Barbie came out, everyone was very appreciative of my review.
“Omg transandrobros criticizing Whipping Girl are so weird. How is this what they’re getting so worked up about? It’s like maybe they just want to be mad at trans women. There’s a word for that you know!”
You cannot be saying this when “read Whipping Girl” has been used as a flat-and-outright, on its own, dismissal of people speaking on transmasculine issues for at least six fucking years now. You cannot continually throw a text at a community, and one which the author has self-reflected as being weak in its assessment of nonbinary and transmasculine issues, as a way to shut them up and not expect them to point out why that’s flawed and call them transmisogynists.
This reads an awful lot like victim blaming to me, “Shut up because this thing says you should. No, don’t talk about that thing’s flaws and why those flaws should maybe make us re-think how we’re treating you because we’ve outright stated that we’re treating you like this because of how your experiences are dictated to us by an author who has criticized her own work for doing such. You’re a transmisogynist if you don’t like how this one trans woman who said she would change some of how she would talk about trans men in her work if she could do it over is describing you in that work she criticized herself. You’re only doing any of this because you hate trans women in the first place, and not because trans women are being wielded as a cudgel by a whole bunch of people, not only trans women, to silence you.”
And it frames the “stop throwing this text at us to tell us to stop talking about the oppression we face. It does a poor job of representing more than the absolute most privileged of transmasculine experience while universalizing that as the idea of how all of us experience the world,” as being just as harmful as, “shut up about the oppression you face.”
This isn’t even a “well we were hit so we can hit back, that’s not worse than the hitting that you were doing” because we aren’t tearing down the entirety of Whipping Girl and saying transmisogyny doesn’t exist, just pulling apart the parts where the text misrepresents experiences which are not the author’s. This is a “we were hit and all we’re doing is saying maybe people shouldn’t be hitting us, and you’re trying to say that what we’re doing is the worse of these two things.”
dragon who kisses you with tongue and deletes shinigami eyes from your web browser
“shinigami eyes is bad?” well i encourage you to draw your own conclusions of course but
Completely unsurprising post to be made by a person who consistently refuses to recognise the reactionary basis of the "transandrophobia" movement
Everyone's always very keen to forget that Shinigami Eyes wasn't actually developed to mark transphobes in general but to help aid the online safety of trans women specifically, and shockingly enough yeah you're more likely to get marked red if you explicitly refuse to oppose the trans cohort of Men's Rights Activists.
The above green-marked statements are obviously pithy off-the-cuff remarks expressing such normal women's frustrations as "men are often misogynist" and "women shouldn't give men infinite patience", but of course these things that are perfectly understandable in the mouths of cis feminists become gross insults when said by a transfem, because everything we ever say is taken in the worst possible faith and we're never allowed to be annoyed or angry.
Being annoyed or angry is not an excuse to be incredibly transphobic actually. One trans woman to another, go fuck yourself.
Hey, btw, Libertineangel is fully lying up there. Shinigami Eyes now exists solely to "protect" a specific subset of reactionary trans women and no one else, including any trans woman who even vaguely steps out of line with the "radical transfeminist" movements online.
However, when the project started, it was explicitly and specifically for ALL trans people of ALL gender assignments and gender identities.
Like. I know that person is right about the use case of the extension now, but they are straight up lying about history here. And really recent history. History most of tumblr's user base lived through on tumblr.
This is a ridiculous thing to lie about, frankly.
Source on the extension including nonbinary people and trans men as per their guidelines as far back and 2019 btw
Gonna be honest, I'm not sure why anyone thought an extension that's basically "THIS person is a bad person! How do we know that? Because other people said so! When you see a marked post, you should know that's a bad person even though you didn't actually see them do anything bad!" was a good idea. You've all been here long enough to see how ridiculous callout posts can get, right? People accuse each other of being x bad thing based on spurious evidence all the time.
Do you know how often I've seen "Shinigami eyes shows this person is a transphobe" as a reply to some innocuous post with absolutely no other evidence? And people going "oh shit I didn't know, I'm so sorry for reblogging from this bad person!" in response?? You can say people should use a tool like this as a starting point, or as a mere warning of possible problems instead of just taking its word for it without any further thought... but most people don't. That's not how humans work. It's the same problem that's leading to people blindly trusting what AI Overview says. Even if it started with good intentions, shinigami eyes getting abused was inevitable and I don't know why so many of yall didn't see it coming.
lol i hate today’s era of absolutely zero nuance takes. a friend didn’t behave exactly as you’d wanted them to? cut them off. a guy didn’t text you back instantly bc he has his own life? he’s just giving you breadcrumbs. doing something makes you uncomfortable? don’t do it anymore. someone isn’t instantly available for you? disinterest. just absolutist statements that often don’t apply to the multilayer situations of everyday life. like. stop. literally just stop it
It's incredible how much pop psychology and therapyspeak boils down to treating individualism as the phenomenological norm for human beings and any form of human communication or relationship based on negotiation, compromise, self-sacrifice and trust as an act of violence against the individual
If i had the money, I would start a business called Box of Rocks. And it would be all electrical appliances that are, as it says on the company logo, as dumb as a box of Rocks.
No wifi or bluetooth connections. No touch screens. No predictive behaviours. No account log in. No fancy bullshit nonsense.
A fridge that does nothing but keep your food cool. A washing machine that washes clothes, the fucking end. And actually on the washing machine note: they would all have optional two-tap ports, so you CAN use the machine to heat the water if you need to, but you dont HAVE to, if youre in a home that has a massive hot water tank or whatever. AND, it would have fast cycles. None of this two hour minimum bullshit. Fuck outta here with that nonsense. 20 minute half-sized fast loads, 45 minute full sized regular loads, and a two hour option for those of you who like things slow or wanna give your towels an extra good long wash or whatever.
Anyway moving on. Dumb clothes dryers that just dry things, at a manually set array of temperatures, not an auto-temp chosen by the machine based on the detected type of fabric or size of the load. Dumb toasters. But QUALITY. None of this "its just fifteen bucks but it will last five minutes" shit. Dumb TVs. With various different ports, while we're at it. You want a security camera, but want full control of who accesses the recordings? Done. Dumb elevators, that go up and down at the press of a button and have no complex bullshit that takes out the whole lift whenever it experiences an internet outage.
DUMB CARS. WITH NO TOUCH SCREENS OR TRACKING TECH OR OTHER BULLSHIT.
GIVE ME MY APPLIANCES AS DUMB AS A BOX OF ROCKS. I DONT WANT THEM MAKING DECISIONS FOR ME. I DON'T WANT THEM "HELPING" ME. I DONT WANT TWO THIRDS OF THE BULLSHIT THATS IN THEM THESE DAYS.
I tried to buy a washing machine recently. They were ALL SOME DEGREE OF FUCKING "SMART." And yeah you can simply opt to not set it up, which is what i ended up doing, but it still prompts me even now to "complete set up?" AND it pushed the overall price of washing machines up because even though I dont plan to USE any of their STUPID smart tech, it was still included in the model! So it costs more! Because its "smart"!
Well i dont WANT IT TO BE SMART. I WANT IT TO BE DUMB. I WANT MANUALLY CHOSEN SETTINGS. I WANT BUTTONS AND KNOBS. I WANT IT TO BE INERT WHEN NOT IN USE. I WANT IT STUPID BUT FUNCTIONAL. THIS CANNOT BE A NICHE MARKET. GIVE ME STUPID APPLIANCES.
While reading this, I beg that people keep my last post about this subject in mind. I do not think Julia Serano was a bad person, or should not have written her book. But I highly doubt after this post anyone will be accusing me of being soft on whipping Girl. Because on this episode of Lily talks shit about whipping girl, it is finally time to tackle the big one. And the conclusions I am going to draw are damning.
I am going to start with this comment on my last post that I think expertly nails down the particular issue with whipping girl, where all the problems stem from. I am not going to cite the person who wrote it because I guarantee this post is going to generate a lot of hate and I want to put as many steps as possible between seeing this and harassing that person, but if you wrote this know I think you are great.
I am going to be less kind about it than the above comment. Julia Serano came up with a social theory that explains the experiences of Julia Serano and then decided that was reflective of all of reality, which she then insists on very vehemently without any consideration of other points of view. She makes light of any prejudice people experience that isn't easily explained by her theory and outright denies and erases prejudice people experience if it is inconvenient to her theory.
I don't think she even accurately represents trans women (even most trans women) as a group. Her theory certainly does not line up with my experience as a trans woman, and the way she makes light or dismisses things that don't fit in her theory is honestly kind of offensive.
As written in whipping girl, her perspective is myopic, her conclusions unsound, and her thinking biased.
I would like to reiterate at this point I don't think she is a bad person, and there is a lot of good in whipping girl. Mainly when she is talking about her own experiences and resists the urge to extrapolate to what that means for other people. And from what I have seen she has improved significantly in the last twenty years. Like I said in my last post, be very critical of a person's words, be as generous as possible with the person.
She fucked it up bad with Whipping Girl, but that doesn't mean she has nothing of value to say or she is a bad person or she can't improve or anything like that. What it does mean, unfortunately, is that many key elements of Whipping Girl are critically flawed and steeped in bias. And even more unfortunately, its the most important parts of the book.
In particular, the section where she coins transmisogyny. To read the whole section, start at the part titled "Trans Woman Manifesto". It is too long to cite in it's entirety here, but this is the part where she actually coins the term transmisogyny:
"When a trans person is ridiculed or dismissed not merely for failing to live up to gender norms, but for their expressions of femaleness or femininity, they become the victims of a specific form of Trans Woman Manifesto discrimination: trans-misogyny. When the majority of jokes made at the expense of trans people center on “men wearing dresses” or “men who want their penises cut off,” that is not transphobia—it is trans-misogyny. When the majority of violence and sexual assaults committed against trans people is directed at trans women, that is not transphobia—it is trans-misogyny. When it’s okay for women to wear “men’s” clothing, but when men who wear “women’s” clothing can be diagnosed with the psychological disorder transvestic fetishism, that is not transphobia—it is trans-misogyny. When women’s or lesbian organizations and events open their doors to trans men but not trans women, that is not transphobia—it is trans-misogyny."
The thing to notice about this section is that transmisogyny is coined almost entirely in terms of comparative oppression. Its not just that trans women experience qualitatively different oppression, it is, according to her, they experience the worst oppression. The most jokes, the most violence, etc.
As it is coined in Whipping Girl, transmisogyny is defined by comparing oppression. That is the central point. And I think this is especially driven home by what she says immediately proceeding her coining the term:
"While trans people on the female-to-male (FTM) spectrum face discrimination for breaking gender norms (i.e., oppositional sexism), their expressions of maleness or masculinity themselves are not targeted for ridicule—to do so would require one to question masculinity itself."
A statement I have called out in the past for being ignorant and completely divorced from reality. This is one of the major points where she outright dismisses the oppression of others because it is convenient to her theory. This is so important to her defining transmisogyny that it immediately proceeds it. What is the single most important thing she wants in your mind when she defines transmisogyny? What does she choose to be the thing that frames the definition? Her assertion that trans men don't have it as bad.
This is really fucking bad.
The context required to understand why comparing oppression, especially in a very hard way like this, is so bad is the stuff of entire books worth of theory.
It is in fact so bad that I don't even know how to explain how bad it is. It is too big a subject to get across in so brief a format. It is the sort of thing you can only do safely with very, very careful consideration, probably something only an expert should do with a lot of careful qualifying statements, and the rest of us should just avoid it completely. Anyone who has studied exclusionist movements of the past 60 years will understand that comparing oppression is always a pillar of exclusionist movements. Disabled communities warn against this, and specifically consider it prejudice to compare "how bad" different types of disability have it. The autistic and neurodivergent communities warn against it. We have special, insulting terms for the prejudice comparing oppression results in ("Playing oppression olympics", for example.)
You don't and shouldn't have to take my word for it. But I can't meaningfully demonstrate it any further here. Go study this on your own if you need more context.
And I don't even think her definition of transmisogyny rests on sound facts. If we include the immediately proceeding statement about trans men, she makes six statements. Of those six, the statement about trans men is just pain prejudice on her part, the statement about trans women suffering the most violence we know isn't true (though it could be argued it was the best information she had at the time), and the idea that women can wear men's clothing shows a deep lack of understanding of recent feminism. Women (in some parts and cultures of the USA, because that is the very narrow view we are actually talking about here) are not allowed to wear mens clothing because masculinity is seen as better, but because feminists fought long and hard to make that a reality. Bias, ignorance, and dismissing the reality of the situation to better fit her theory are in full display in these three statements.
I would even argue that the statements about jokes and who is allowed in queer spaces are questionable in how lightly she addresses what are very complex issues, and that she is assuming much. I would argue that the only thing in the entire section that is not questionable is the second statement:
"When a trans person is ridiculed or dismissed not merely for failing to live up to gender norms, but for their expressions of femaleness or femininity, they become the victims of a specific form of Trans Woman Manifesto discrimination: trans-misogyny."
Now I don't think we should throw out transmisogyny as a term, it has evolved since then. But I do think that we have been dealing with the fallout of such a disastrous coining of the phrase ever since.
Understanding how transmisogyny was coined in Whipping Girl explains a lot about the behavior of people who have based a lot of their understanding of the trans woman condition on Whipping Girl. I am going to highlight two such things.
First off, there is an enduring hatred from many trans women towards any effort of trans men who speak out about their own oppression, especially when they try to create terms to use for themselves.
If a core part of the definition of transmisogyny is that trans women have it the worst, specifically in comparison to trans men, then someone trying to coin a similar term for trans men is directly challenging and attacking the very concept of transmisogyny. For example, if "transandrophobia" is, as many have said, "like transmisogyny, but for trans men", then they are incompatible terms under this understanding of transmisogyny and transfeminine as a whole.
People who understand transmisogyny as "trans women have it worst" see transandrophobia, a term that seems to mirror transmisogyny and is even sometimes explained in those terms, then they assume "transandrophobia" asserts that trans men have it worst. And since only one group can have it worst, this means they see transandrophobia, or any attempt to coin a conceptually similar term, as a direct attack on the idea of transmisogyny. This quickly becomes a deep and enduring belief that any trans man talking about their issues is making a direct attack at the concept of trans femininity. It becomes of overwhelming importance to establish an us and them and to establish who has it worse (TMA vs TME). And it becomes necessary to drive out anyone who would challenge the narrative they believe is so important.
And so an exclusionist movement is born.
The second consequence I want to talk about is the way that this kind of belief necessitates the flattening of trans women into fitting into the Julia Serano model. Trans women who do not fit this mold, who do not agree, who are not like Julia Serano, are excluded and silenced for going against the dominant narrative.
That covers trans men and trans women, but I know it hurts other trans people just as much, but I don't think I understand enough to explain why and how. I am sorry for that, but understand that this is incomplete without talking about how this contributes to other prejudices, especially exorcism.
A lot of people believe it is psyops driving a lot of trans infighting. I think it is simply a matter of prejudice born of bad ideas taken to their logical end.
“This Is Why You’re Always So Tired”
I wish I'd known that it was okay to want to feel safe. That I was allowed to want that.
I was surrounded by "everyone gets nervous sometimes, we all have to deal with it" and "sometimes you have to push through even though you feel anxious" and "you have to do things that scare you to overcome the fear" and even now, it's what they say: "Do it scared."
I was also reassured that "everyone feels anxious" about certain things, and "no one likes [thing]."
This affected my understanding of what it meant to "get better." When I imagined a future version of myself that was capable of enduring [The Bad Things], I didn't imagine a feeling of safety. I didn't know how to imagine it. All I could do is try to remove my feelings of dread and horror and revulsion from the scene, as though cutting a shape out of a magazine with craft scissors. But it was unclear how those feelings could be removed in life.
I think my imagination of "getting better" was something like "becoming more dissociated." Everyone felt these things I felt, and they were inevitable and unchangeable, but I felt them too much, and I needed to feel them less, so I could become more compliant.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy didn't even make me feel them less, though; it only made me less capable of acknowledging that I was feeling them, less conscious of what my feelings were.
Eliminating "anxious" cognitions did not make me "better"; when I was 20-21 and had my Big Breakdown, I was not having anxious "thoughts" except as weirdly tactile, intrusive, spewing overflowing jets of imagery and words related to [The Bad Things].
I had trained myself not to have panic attacks, but my body was constantly wound tight with tension. I was in pain a lot. I would wake up with my back hurting, tense with my sheets soaked in sweat. I almost failed a Tai Chi class because I could not make my body relax enough to do the forms.
It was very hard for me to learn that my internal experience of my body was its own reality, that it was a reality separate from my ability to comply with external expectations.
I still remember the horrible, isolating experience of trying to find something real about my experience that I could prove to an outside observer, and of trying to reach a level of distress where I was actually physically prevented from functioning. I was tormented by the fact that I was physically able to "push through" the fear; I hadn't yet reached the point where I became completely consumed with panic and lost control of my body, or collapsed or threw up on myself, and that meant I was choosing to be weak, and my torment was partially my fault, because I had not "pushed myself" to the utmost extent possible.
So I scrounged together "evidence" of how my fear was affecting me: the intrusive sensations and thoughts that seemed to be hydraulically pumped into my brain, the nightmares, the daily pain and soreness, the grinding teeth, but it still didn't feel like enough.
This "evidence-finding" took up a lot of my daily thoughts on my own condition. I was very preoccupied with clinging to bodily "evidence" of distress.
In hindsight, I realize that I did not consider my own subjective experience of suffering to be evidence that I was suffering. At least, I felt that my subjective experience of suffering was irrelevant to whether I deserved care. I felt, in a half-formed and poorly understood way, that my subjective experience could be misleading or "false."
My experiences with therapy, the various workbooks and other tools my mom bought for me, and the resources I found online and elsewhere for dealing with "anxiety" were preoccupied with "thoughts" as the form "anxiety" took. Separately, they taught me breathing exercises and other bodily "relaxation" techniques that were supposed to control the physical processes of anxiety.
I see this as a domination and control-based framework: by erasing "wrong" cognitions and replacing them with "right" ones, and by forcing your inhales and exhales to be a certain number of seconds long, you can make the process of fear in your body stop, or at least override it with the "higher" part of your consciousness. This was accompanied by repeated mantras that my anxiety was not "real," that it was "lying" to me, that it was a monster that was somehow invading and usurping my "real" self, which I could will into being by thinking the right thoughts.
This did not work, at all, ever, and my mental health descended into an incredibly deep black hole before I rejected everything I had learned before and (over several years) discovered and tried accepting some radically different principles about myself:
that my fear was a fundamentally real experience, whether externally judged as "rational" or "irrational"
that my fear was a primal survival instinct inherent to my body's functioning
that my fear's fundamental function was to protect and advocate for me, ensuring that my safety needs were met
This evolved (over several more years) into a further understanding that my fear provided information about what my safety needs were, and eventually developed in me an ability to actually examine safety and unsafety, and to feel both of those things, and to develop deeper understanding of how safety needs can be met.
Little me was not taught how to feel safe, she was taught how to look normal.
On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce — a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that “everybody” is suddenly talking about the same thing — can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas. We’ve locked ourselves in the stupidest possible version of Plato’s cave, where what looks like the spontaneous consensus of the hive mind is often just shadows on the wall, put there by marketers, political operatives, foreign-influence campaigns, or anyone else with a few hundred bucks and something to sell. “Everybody is doing this now,” Lim says. “And if you’re not, you’re behind.”
Lane Brown, The Feed Is Fake
